Dale T. Mortensen


Dale Thomas Mortensen was an American economist and Nobel laureate.

Early life and education

Mortensen was born in Enterprise, Oregon. He received his BA in economics from Willamette University and his PhD in Economics from Carnegie Mellon University.

Career

Mortensen had been on the faculty of Northwestern University since 1965 and a professor of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences at the Kellogg School of Management since 1980. He was the Niels Bohr Visiting Professor at the School of Economics and Management, Aarhus University, from 2006 to 2010.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics jointly with Christopher A. Pissarides from the London School of Economics and Peter A. Diamond from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2010 "for their analysis of markets with search frictions". In May 2011, Mortensen was awarded an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Willamette University. He was married to Beverly Mortensen, also a Northwestern Professor.
Mortensen's research focused on labor economics, macroeconomics and economic theory. He is especially known for his pioneering work on the search and matching theory of frictional unemployment. He extended the insights from this work to study labor turnover and reallocation, research and development, and personal relationships.
Mortensen was a past president of the Society of Economic Dynamics and one of the founding editors of the Review of Economic Dynamics.

Death

Mortensen died of stage 4 lung cancer on January 9, 2014, at the age of 74, at his home in Wilmette.

Awards, fellowships

In February 2011, Mortensen had a building named in his honor at Aarhus University. The Dale T. Mortensen Building is the central hub for all international and PhD activities and contains the new PhD House, Dale's Café, the university's International Centre and the new IC Dormitory for international PhD students.

Selected publications